chapter four

THE

Steven Runciman wrote “There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade”.1 The claim might well be an exaggeration but there is no doubt that it ranks very high on the list. The Fourth Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Innocent III in 1198, in an attempt to restore the old Latin . The proclamation was especially successful in France, thanks to the efforts of a priest called Fulk of Neuilly. An agreement was reached with the Venetians to transport and feed an army of 4,500 knights, 9,000 squires and 20,000 footsoldiers and to provide 50 warships.2 With no more than 11,000 men (but no reduction in the price by the Venetians), the fleet set sail in October 1202 and first recaptured Zara on the Dalmatian coast (despite the objections to attacking a Christian city—yet attacking Zara was very little compared to the later sack of ). Innocent III was against the taking of Zara and had written to the crusading army urging them to avoid all attacks on Christian cities. He excommunicated the whole army when they did not listen to his warnings, although the French and Germans managed to have the excommunication lifted, and returned to the fold of the . The army spent the winter of 1202–1203 in Zara. An unexpected turn of events came with the proposal to restore the rightful emperor of Byzantium to his throne—Alexius IV Angelus had been blinded and imprisoned by his own brother Alexius III. He escaped from prison and offered the crusading army just about every- thing in return for his throne—the union of the Orthodox with the Roman Church, enormous sums of money for both the army and for , and 10,000 soldiers once he was ruling again. There was further opposition to attacking a Christian city with a Christian

1 Steven Runciman, A History of the 3—The Kingdom of Acre (Cambridge 1954), 130. 2 Cf. Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades (Oxford 1988, translated from German original Stuttgart 1965), 198. 186 the fourth crusade

2 army, although Mayer states that one of the ways the objections of the common soldier were overcome was “the descriptions of the unbe- lievable quantity of relics which were to be found in Constantinople”. The reason for changing the objective of the Fourth Crusade from Egypt (and then the Holy Land) to Constantinople will probably never be definitively known. It could have been what Mayer describes as “chance”, i.e. one event leading to another, or it could have been a premeditated plan from the beginning. Either way, the first attacks in summer 2003 caused Alexius III to flee, thus restoring Alexius IV to his throne, together with his father Isaac II Angelus, although they were not popular and were both killed in January 1204. The city finally fell to the crusaders in April 1204, and for three days there was little more than plunder and killing to describe. Oaths had been sworn to the effect that the soldiers could only take items of lesser value as plunder, churches and priests would be respected and women would not be raped; the oaths were thrown to the wind in the face of so much temptation. As Mayer states, “for the relic hunter it was the chance of a lifetime”.3 Relics had been taken back from previous crusades, but they mainly consisted of stones and soil from the holy places in and around Jerusalem: Gethsemane, Calvary, the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb of Lazarus and Bethlehem. A piece of the true cross was taken to Genoa along with the plate on which John the Baptist’s head had been placed, while Venice acquired the body of and a rock from which Christ preached.4 The defenders of Constantinople carried some amazing relics into battle; an of Mary and the apostles, with a tooth Jesus lost as a child, a piece of the lance used to pierce his side on the cross, part of the Shroud and and relics from thirty martyrs.5 The relics did not have the desired effect, as they were captured in battle by a French knight, Peter of Bracieux. One of the main eyewitness accounts of the conquest and sacking of Constantinople in 1204 hascomedowntousintheformofthe account by a French knight, Robert de Clari, preserved in one sole manuscript in the Royal Library of Copenhagen. De Clari mentions

3 Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades (Oxford 1988, translated from German origi- nal Stuttgart 1965), 203. 4 Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the (London 2004), 52–53. 5 Cf. Alfred J. Andrea, Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade (Leiden 2000), 302.